Dream Team: Issue Thirteen

The traveling circus is, for all intents and purposes, dead to the world. A mere shell of the once magnificent enterprise that meandered all around the nineteenth century countryside, Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and countless others enthusiastically delivered decades of big-top culture to the unsuspecting cow towns and burgs of this overly patriotic nation of ours.

Now the circus rarely comes to town-and when it does, it’s all elephant poop and broken-down tour buses. We still have wandering companies of entertainers, but you can forget about the barkers, the jugglers, and the midway. You just can’t fit all that stuff into a backpack.

Bare-boned and streamlined as they may be, today’s best drifting demonstrators are by no means one-trick ponies. Arriving via minivan, extended cab, motor home, or commercial airline, “teams” of skateboarders show up everywhere from Bismarck to Brisbane carrying the torch of the touring carnival along with their boards and a seemingly bottomless bag of skate wizardry.

The resulting phenomenon will never claim to be the greatest show on Earth, but by humbly delivering three-ring entertainment to the geographically locked skaters of our orbiting stone, it’s earned a foothold here as the newest Dream Team category.

Hard to define, you know it when you see it-and we know you’ve seen it-your starting five and five backups for the All-Style Team will appear in TransWorld’s Twentieth Anniversary issue due out in November.

In these days it seems like pro sponsorship and signature shoes go hand in hand. But which pros are out in full force killing it on a daily basis who don’t have their name stitched on the underside of a tongue.